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19 July 2011 early edition/transcript/Suspension
Suspension LOUISE MENSCH: The good news is that I am your last questioner. I would like to ask you a few very specific questions. Starting with you, Mr James Murdoch, I know we have been over at length the differences in the size of the Taylor settlement and the other settlements of far less monetary value. Can you tell me whether the Taylor settlement included a confidentiality clause and whether the other settlement did not? MURDOCH ACCOSTED WHITTINGDALE: The sitting is suspended for 10 minutes. [COUNTDOWN STUDIO] OLBERMANN: Well we're not exactly sure what occurred just there, but events have been suspended, as you heard the Chairman say, for ten minutes. Some sort of event taking place, you could see from the wide shot that they cut to just before the feed was cut off from the center there. Here it is again: someone appeared to have lunged in the direction of Rupert Murdoch from the camera-left position, and the police came in to interrupt. From what we could see anyway, no one hurt. What happened has yet to be explained, and we will address that as more information becomes available, whether that fell under the description of an attack or an accosting. Let's look at it one more time. OF ACCOSTING James Murdoch goes to- yes, it seems like someone came close to making contact to Rupert Murdoch, but you saw he never even rose, and does not seem to be in any distress under the circumstances. The former New York City commissioner of schools- the superintendant of schools Joel Klein rose to his defense there as you saw. So let's, while they're in the ten-minute break, let me call back in John Dean, our Countdown Contributor in Los Angeles who's been watching all this with us. We have many things to go over in this break, and I think, John, let me get, first off, your overview or what you saw and how this went for the Murdochs before the untimely interruption. DEAN: Went pretty much as I expected, Keith. I thought that Rupert Murdoch would have very little knowledge, that his son James would be more of the protagonist in the discussion, which he has been. He's the hands-on executive; he's the heir-apparent; he's trying to show that he's quite competent to handle it. The father only deals with the big issues, and has got many issues in his 50,000-plus employee corporation, and some of these smaller details never reach his attention. So that was pretty much the setting. The other thing is: they're clearly well-rehearsed. They know and they've anticipated a lot of these questions, they know what they're going to answer, they know how they can give half-answers to some questions, more full to others, and then take the version of the fifth that they take in the U.K. when they think that's absolutely necessary, `cause they're treading awfully close into the criminal area. So it's pretty much as projected. They're doing a good job. They're handle themselves well, but I find it as interesting as anything that Joel Klein, who was the first to leap to his feet in this instance just now, is sitting back there sort of like the rooster in charge, and I think he is. I think that this is all being guided by him. He's an experienced attorney. He's never done crisis management, but this is what you- this is crisis management you're seeing in action. OLBERMANN: He did also seem to be particularly concerned with pulling some objects out of his ear and then checking to see what they were, but perhaps that's a subject best left for another conversation. I have a report now- DEAN: You said it, not me. OLBERMANN: The British newspaper the Guardian is giving us some skeletal details of what we saw at the end there in their live blog on this, which I highly recommend to everyone. "Someone has just tried to attack Rupert Murdoch. His wife, Wendi, seemed to slap the person." And then a further update that says, "a young man in a checked shirt has been detained by police." The last of the ten questioners on this Committee, the Culture, Media, and Sport Committee meeting at Portcullis House literally across the street from the Houses of Parliament, was Louise Mensch, in the middle of her first question, I guess, and then the Chairman John Whittingdale said they'd be adjourned for ten minutes. There did not seem to be any actual injuries sustained, and we assume we're going to start again with Missus Mensch's questions in a few minutes. But, to me, I thought James Murdoch had presented himself reasonably well if the goal was to sort of indicate what a huge company it was, and how little anybody seemed to know what was going on. There were two moments that struck me. One was this idea that anything that's a crisis goes to Rupert Murdoch, and that was sort of just left hanging there, John. This certainly seems to have constituted a crisis far earlier than the fact of the Milly Dowler story had broken seventeen days ago. No one followed up with the question: "why didn't this rise to the level of crisis that you would hear about, Mister Murdoch?" DEAN: It is surprising. You know, what we haven't seen, and we may never see, but obviously somebody's going to take a look at soon, are their internal documents on this, where they've alerted one another, they've communicated on it, they've set policy which probably fits broadly within what they're telling the Committee. But much more action was taken with some of these things than they're going to reveal. You know, Keith, the one- the one moment in the hearing so far that struck me, as an attorney- a trained attorney, is when James Murdoch was asked if he'd engaged in willful neglect, or he- in other words- OLBERMANN: Willful blindness. DEAN: Willful blindness. It's a well-known term; it's been written into a lot of statutes; it was actually in the drug field that they enforced this, where people saw transactions that they said, "well, we don't know what was going on." But it's a key part of the law. His response of pretending to not even know what that term meant- his father jumped right in and knew exactly what it was, and said, "no, we haven't engaged in that." It's just inconceivable to me that both weren't briefed on that, and that a lot of that isn't going on. OLBERMANN: Well let's look at that exact excerpt, and we can comment on it again. But here's that; here's the "willful blindness" moment. VIDEO SANDERS: Are you familiar with the term "willful blindness"? JAMES: Mister Sanders, would you care to elaborate? SANDERS: It is a term that came up in the Enron scandal. Willful blindness is a legal term. It states that if there is knowledge that you could have had and should have had, but chose not to have, you are still responsible. JAMES: Mister Sanders, do you have a question? SANDERS: I asked you- JAMES: Respectfully, I just do not know what you would like me to say. SANDERS: The question was whether you were aware— JAMES: I'm not aware of that- I'm not aware of that particular phrase. SANDERS: But now you are familiar with the term, because I have explained it to you. Thank you, Mister Chairman. JAMES: Thank you, Mr Sanders. RUPERT: I have heard the phrase before, and we were not ever guilty of that. [COUNTDOWN STUDIO] OLBERMANN: So who's in charge there, John? I guess that's the question. DEAN: Right. LAUGHS Right. The Senior had no question that he wasn't going to walk into that, and I think Junior, in a sense, opened himself up to not even wanting to understand the term. And this is where he has exposure. Some things that were done that he surely, or could have, or might have gotten hints of, this is where his troubles are going to arise. OLBERMANN: One more detail about the assault. The reports claim from England now that this assailant was a U.K. Uncut activist, and there was an attempt apparently to hit him with- hit Rupert Murdoch perhaps with shaving cream. The man has been detained and there's a white substance on his face which may have been his own shaving cream, which did not get to Rupert Murdoch and somehow wound up on the man's face. So as dramatic as this was, it may not, in turn, turn out to have been very serious. To resume during this unanticipated half-time, to continue on with our British verbiage here, there was one, to me, remarkable moment in which Mister Murdoch was asked about his own responsibility for events in the company and was he ultimately responsible for what happened here. I'd like to play that and then get your reaction to it. VIDEO SHERIDAN: Mister Murdoch, do you accept that ultimately you are responsible for this whole fiasco? RUPERT: No. SHERIDAN: You're not responsible? Who is responsible? RUPERT: The people that I trusted to run things, then maybe the people that they trusted. SHERIDAN: Can you name… RUPERT: I worked with Mr Hinton for 52 years and I would trust him with my life. [COUNTDOWN STUDIO] OLBERMANN: So that's a lot of distance between himself and whoever is actually responsible here. That's not just one set of other people, that's two sets of other people, John. DEAN: That's unusual for a lot of executives. Even Richard Nixon, if you recall, took ultimate responsibility for things he claimed he had no knowledge of. Mister Murdoch looks at it a little differently, clearly. And, you know, what's not also been explained well, Keith, is why the heads that have rolled within their organization have rolled. They don't really seem to understand why these people tendered their resignations. That has appeared throughout the hearing so far. Can these people be this really out of touch about what's happened within their organization? Can they not have anticipated some of these people were going to turn in? Another big moment for me in this hearing so far is the fact that they are paying- OLBERMANN: Yes. DEAN: -after the arrests and convictions of two of the people who started all this. Now that- that was a stunner. And- OLBERMANN: Let's play that. DEAN: But yet, they know no details. OLBERMANN: Yeah, let's play that. The man at the center of this, the man who hacked into the voicemail of the kidnapped and murdered twelve-old-girl Milly Dowler in 2002 – the revelation of this literally inside of three weeks ago, turned this into the most extraordinary media scandal of our times certainly, and as extraordinary an event as the British Parliament has seen in its recent history – was named Glenn Mulcaire. And in an exchange with one of the members of this Culture, Media, and Sport Committee, James Murdoch revealed that, in fact, some of Mister Mulcaire's legal fees are still, or were still being paid by NewsCorp. Here's the clip. VIDEO FARRELLY: Can you understand that people might ask why a company might wish to pay the legal fees of a convicted felon, who has been intimately involved in the destruction of your reputation, if it were not to buy his cooperation and silence? JAMES: No, it is not. I can understand that, and that is exactly why I asked the question—when the allegations came out, I said, "How can we? Are we doing this? Is this what the company is doing?" And on legal advice—again, I do not want to be legalistic; and I'm not a lawyer, but these are serious litigations and it is important for all of the evidence from all of the defendants to get to court at the right time. And the strong advice was that, from time to time, it is important, and customary even, to pay co-defendant's legal fees. I have to rest on counsel's advice on some of these serious litigation matters. FARRELLY: Is the organisation still contributing to Glenn Mulcaire's legal fees? JAMES: As I said earlier, Mister Farrelly, I do not know the precise status of that now, but I do know that I asked for the company to find a way for those things to cease with respect to these things. FARRELLY: Will you let us know? JAMES: I'm happy to follow up with the Committee on the status of those legal fees. [COUNTDOWN STUDIO] OLBERMANN: And before I follow up with you, John Dean, about that, I have what I think is the final update from the event that interrupted the testimony minutes ago. Jane Martenson of Britain's newspaper the Guardian reports that the man "was sitting four rows back, calmly walked up with a plate of shaving foam," and "smacked it in Rupert's face. Wendi" – that's his wife – "intervened." So it appears that Rupert Murdoch was hit in the face with a plate full of shaving cream. The testimony is supposed to continue, probably within a few minutes. We're still seeing a blank screen out of Portcullis House in the hearing room there. But, no: let's get back to this revelation that they have paid the legal fees of the man who is at the center of this. And no one, again- we got that little minute exchange with Tom Watson of the Labour Party, but it didn't really seem to resonate. You would think that was almost: "is there or has there ever been a taping system in the Oval Office" moment. That was extraordinary. DEAN: Well, yeah, and what's interesting is in my recollection, and I made a note of it as we were going along, Rupert Murdoch weighed back in on that issue, and a minute later appeared to be asked if he thought this was okay, and he didn't like it. And he was sort of telling his son, "this is a mistake." He said, you know, "unless there's a binding contract, let's cut this business out." So that may be something that these two didn't share amongst themselves. Keith, one other thing that's running through this entire proceeding, if you'll notice, is they're saying, "the lawyers told us it was okay. The lawyers said it was okay to settle this money. The lawyers told us it was okay to proceed in this way." Now they may- these lawyers may never be called, because they're under an attorney-client privilege, and this is a very effective defense unless you crack that privilege. In the United States, we slowly yielded on the privilege, and in some situations it has to go. I'm not sure— OLBERMANN: John, I'm going to interrupt you. We're restarting at Portcullis House. Here's the Chairman.